Grigory Petrovich Goldstein

Grigory Petrovich Goldstein ( Russian Григорий Петрович Гольдштейн , scientific. Transliteration Grigory Petrovich Gol'dštejn * 1870 in Odessa , † 1941 ) was a Russian painter , graphic artist and photographer , who primarily for his recordings of Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks of the out of time October Revolution and the Civil War became known.

Life

Grigori Goldstein was the child of a Jewish family and was actually called Gerschon-Lejzer Perezowitsch Goldstein. He completed an apprenticeship as a painter and graphic artist. From 1907 he was initially a draftsman for the Moscow newspaper "Der Morgen" (Utro). Working as a retoucher, he got to know photography and used it instead of hand-drawn sketches to plan illustration drawings. In 1915 he moved to the Moscow newspaper "Frühmorgens" (Rannee utro), where he worked as a photo reporter. He turned to the Bolsheviks and photographed the course of the October Revolution in the streets of Moscow.

After the October Revolution he supported political propaganda in the summer of 1919 on the agitation ship “Red Star” operating in the Volga and Kama. In the 1920s he was an employee of the All-Russian Cinema and Photo Department of the Ministry of Education of the Soviet Union and worked for the state film production and censorship authority Goskino . In 1924 he worked with Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein on the film Strike .

He was briefly arrested in the late 1930s in connection with the Stalinist purges , but was released again. He died in 1941.

The recordings from May 5, 1920

On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave speeches to Red Army soldiers from a wooden grandstand on the former theater square in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow , who were to go to war against Poland shortly afterwards . Leon Trotsky and Leo Kamenev were also present . Goldstein and his colleague Leo Leonidow were commissioned to document this event. While Leonidow mingled with the audience and got right up to the wooden grandstand, Goldstein took his photos from a small hill. He used a Hertz-Anschütz brand stereoscopic camera for this . Despite the less than favorable circumstances, he achieved two recordings so well that they later became Soviet icons. Both pictures were taken a few seconds apart; they differ in Lenin's posture, the direction of Trotsky and Kamenev's gaze, and slightly in Goldstein's point of view. One was initially published in 1923 in the weekly Krasnaya Niva No. 44 and reprinted repeatedly, including as a postcard. In 1927 it appeared in a representative album with 100 recordings of the revolutionary leader who died in 1924.

The original photograph and the retouched image
Grigori Petrovich Goldstein , 1920
Photographs
Moscow State Historical Museum

Trotsky, clearly recognizable in the pictures, was defeated in a power struggle within the Communist Party , he was expelled from the party in 1927 and expelled from the country in 1929. Now the new ruler Stalin tried to erase the memory of the founder of the Red Army from public memory - Trotsky fell victim to the damnatio memoriae . (→ Censorship in the Soviet Union ) Goldstein's photos have therefore only been printed in a cropped version since the 1930s, which no longer shows the right edge of the picture with Trotsky and Kamenev, who was executed in 1936 after a show trial . As a result, however, Lenin was moved from the center of the picture, the central perspective and the dynamics of the picture were lost. As an alternative, the Soviet artist Isaak Israilewitsch Brodski recorded the event in 1933 in a socialist-realistic historical painting that was based on Goldstein's photographs, but no longer showed Trotsky and Kamenev. With Brodski, the soldiers who are listening are also much more disciplined towards Lenin, they wear banners with Bolshevik slogans or write down Lenin's words.

When a magnificent volume was planned for Lenin's 100th birthday in 1970 in the Soviet Union, which should contain all of the photos of its founder, Goldstein's photo was retouched . Hardly cropped it now showed the whole speaker's platform again, but instead of the non-characters Trotsky and Kamenev, the small staircase that led up to them could now be seen. Goldstein's photo was circulated in this form into the era of glasnost and perestroika . Today it is published many times in contrasting compilation with Goldstein's original recording in order to document the Soviet practice of image manipulation and falsification of history .

literature

• David King : Stalin's retouching. Photo and art manipulation in the Soviet Union. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-930908-33-6 .
• Daniela Mrázkowá, Vladimir Remeš: The Soviet Union between the world wars. 175 photographs from the years 1917–1941. Stalling Verlag GmbH, Oldenburg 1981, ISBN 3-7979-1356-7
• Klaus Waschik: Where is Trotsky? Soviet image politics as a memory control in the 1930s. In: Gerhard Paul (ed.): The century of pictures. Volume 1: 1900 to 1949 (= publication series of the Federal Agency for Political Education 772). Special edition. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2009, ISBN 978-3-89331-949-7 , pp. 252-259.

Web links

Commons : Grigori Petrowitsch Goldstein  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Tarek Chafik, How Stalin erased memories on arte.de.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/life/newsid_2967000/2967651.stm , accessed on July 13, 2013
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Mrázkowá, Remeš: The Soviet Union between the World Wars , p. 206
3. ↑ So z. B. Hans-W. Ballhausen, Ludwig Bernlochner et al., “History and Events II. Upper Level Edition A / B”, Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf 2001, p. 223 or “Kursbuch Geschichte. From antiquity to the present ”, Cornelsen, Berlin 2000, p. 281. Both textbooks date the retouching to the Stalin era.